To absolutely ensure maximum accessibility for your users, your website mark-up should be valid to the W3 guidelines. Using WordPress and multitudes of plugins that inject further code into your source can make that all very difficult.
File-size and bandwidth obsessions are not bad qualities to find in a webmaster: bandwidth costs you money, and the longer it takes for someone to download all the bits and pieces that make up your site, the more likely it is that your visitor will give up and leave - especially if your server is already busy serving hundreds of files to somebody else…!
One of the biggest expenses in bandwidth is AJAX libraries: although they’re developed to be relatively compact, and you can minify them easily, a full version of JQuery UI 1.6 will “cost” you and your visitors almost half a megabyte! And the worst thing is, every time that same person goes off to another site which also uses the exact same library as the one of your site, they still have to download it all over again.
Nice Pictures are a relatively young company made up of a group of experienced and dedicated producers focused on delivering quality feature films for cinema and DVD.
They commissioned me to develop and deploy their website in order to create a central repository to keep investors informed of their progress, to advertise the seven films they currently hold on their slate, and to attract more interest.
Eight years ago when IE6 was released, the majority of websites were still single-colour, square-edged and table-based with the occasional hard-edged animated gif. Microsoft could be forgiven for not implementing transparency support for PNGs because at that time there was no need for it, and since the majority of people accessing the internet were sucking it through an asthmatic 56k dial-up modem, web developers couldn’t use the larger-file sizes in their sites anyway.
Times have changed since then but sadly IE6 still takes up enough of a market-share of browsers on-line that this incapability to render the transparent sections of PNGs is almost crippling. Below is a screen shot from a PNG-dependant website I developed last year part-way through it’s development: I’m only pleased it didn’t look worse in IE6 than just a simple transparency problem..!
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